Tackling Higher Education Costs

When Widener undergraduates in Dr. Wes Leckrone’s classes talk about tuition, they
aren’t simply grumbling about the cost of college—they are trying to do something
about it.

Leckrone, an associate professor of political science, and students in his introductory
American Government course in fall 2012 established a Super PAC—a new version of political
action committee that supports causes—titled College Students Concerned by College
Costs. In his spring 2013 course, Politics, Policy, and Higher Education, students
continued the committee's work by researching the issue of college costs and developing
content for the website http://knowyourcollegecosts.org.

The students visited the state capitol in Harrisburg in April to lobby lawmakers in
support of the Middle Income Student Debt Reduction Act, a proposal that would make
more state grants available for middle-income students. They tracked down busy state
representatives and senators, trying to get a few minutes of their time to gain support
for the bills supporting the act. The students met with 11 lawmakers, including Senate
Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi and Andy Dinniman, minority chair of the Senate Committee
on Education. "We were able to share our opinions about higher education bills and
let our voices be heard," said Andrea Stickley, a political science major from Norristown,
Pennsylvania. "As a student with ambitions of working with government to enact important
change, especially when it comes to the cost of higher education, I am happy that
I took the time to visit Harrisburg and learn more about legislative politics."

Leckrone said his students learned much about the complexity of the issues of higher
education funding, and that the trip to Harrisburg was an enlightening experience
to real-world problems. "They learned that it wasn't an amateurs' game," he said.

The project by Leckrone's classes is just one of several by Widener undergraduate
and graduate students focused on the issue of college costs. Leckrone's classes, a
Business Analytics class, and doctoral students in the graduate higher education program
were part of a national collaborative undergraduate research study on the cost of
higher education. The group study is being conducted by Widener and three other members
of the New American Colleges and Universities (NAC&U), a national consortium of selective,
small to mid-size independent colleges and universities dedicated to the purposeful
integration of liberal education, professional studies, and civic engagement.

Participants were tasked with researching the questions: What are the true costs of
a college education, and why do costs keep rising at private, non-profit institutions?
Dr. Loyd Bastin, coordinator of undergraduate research, and Provost Stephen C. Wilhite
structured Widener's contribution to the research to include an advocacy perspective,
a business perspective, and a higher education perspective.

Widener was the only school in the project to form a Super PAC and involve doctoral
students in the research. "The Widener students and faculty really took hold of the
project," said NAC&U President Nancy Hensel, who spearheaded the project's focus on
college costs. "I was really pleased with what Widener did. They were enthusiastic
and they took risks. I think they were really good about seeing the possibility of
this type of research."Dr. Timothy M. Sullivan, director of Widener's graduate programs in higher education,
said the sharing of information between undergraduate and graduate students and faculty
from different schools at Widener added a dynamic element to the project. "It really
exposed us to different ways of thinking that I found both helpful and exciting,"
he said.

A Report for the PresidentWhile Leckrone's undergraduates were busy forming their own Super PAC and lobbying
in Harrisburg, two doctoral students enrolled in Sullivan's Scholar Practitioner Leadership
Project course tackled the topic with a different approach. Catherine DeHart, director
of planned giving at Widener, and Mitch Murtha, director of judicial affairs at Northampton
Community College, created a hypothetical scenario in which they were serving on the
staff of a private university where the president assigned them to prepare a brief
addressing the issues of college costs. DeHart and Murtha delved into data and recent
scholarship on the project and quickly discovered why the complex issue has been so
difficult for colleges and universities to address. "So many colleges do things in
different ways," Murtha said. "We were just trying to wrap our heads around it. It's
a very elusive topic."

Despite the challenges presented by the issue, DeHart and Murtha developed a number
of recommendations: linking endowments more closely to an institution's mission; evaluating
and assessing how tuition is determined and practicing transparency in communications
about costs; assessing high expense areas such as instruction and academic support
to measure efficiency; and developing transparent budget and accounting practices
to show how revenue and expenses are allocated within the institution's budget. Their
bottom line was that schools cannot continue the status quo. "Private institutions
of higher education cannot continue to operate as they have," DeHart and Murtha wrote.

Inside the NumbersA third group of students, undergraduates in the School of Business Administration,
took a purely statistical approach to the issue, focusing on college spending. Dr.
Richard Goeke's Business Analytics class analyzed the relationship between tuition
and five of the largest expense categories in higher education: faculty salaries,
administrative counts, research and public service, buildings, and athletics.

The students researched data available over a ten-year period from the NCAA and the
Delta Cost Project, an independent nonprofit organization whose mission is to help
improve college affordability by controlling costs and improving productivity. They
focused only on private colleges and universities, but the amount of data left to
analyze still consisted of a spreadsheet with 932 columns and 16,000 rows. "It was
a lot of work for these students to understand what data was where, to work around
missing data, and to fix anomalies in the data," said Goeke, an associate professor
of business administration.

After working through the challenges presented by the massive amount of data and how
it was represented, the students found that each of the cost areas explained a significant
portion of the variance in the cost of tuition when measured in isolation. However,
two of the equations—administrative costs and research and public service—produced
dubious results.

Troubled by the suspect results, Goeke decided to add another variable to the equation—time,
which acted as a proxy for inflation. When calendar years were included as a variable,
Goeke found that the passage of time was the single most influential factor in explaining
the rise in tuition. "The driver of tuition costs, according to our analyses, was
simply moving from one year to the next," Goeke said. "If you look at why tuition
went up, it's because it could go up. Each of our hypotheses proved out—faculty salaries,
administrative numbers, and research and public service all correlated with the rise
in tuition, but the best predictor by far with regard to rise in tuition was our proxy
for inflation."

Next StepsWidener participants in the study feel there is much more research to be done, and
faculty plan to continue pursuing the topic with student participation. Goeke is looking
to publish the initial findings from his class, but he would like to continue the
statistical analysis by comparing schools with high tuition growth to schools with
low tuition growth. "We've only opened the lid on this," he said. "There are so many
different ways we can go with this data."

Leckrone's students will continue their advocacy efforts, with new students becoming
involved in the effort each semester to work with students who launched the Super
PAC. "They are willing to come back and mentor new students in the project on their
own, which is exciting," he said.

For Sullivan, the purpose of the projects goes above and beyond the issue of the cost
of higher education. The fou faculty members involved presented on the collaborative
and interdisciplinary structure of the research project at the university's Faculty
Professional Development Week as a possible model for other faculty to consider. "One
of the most important aspects of this project was getting the students to look at
the same questions in different ways and from different perspectives," Sullivan said.
"It was a truly collaborative learning experience for both the students and the faculty."

Photo Caption: In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (front right),
met with Widener students and faculty, including political science major Andrea Stickley
(back row, second from right), and Associate Professor of political science Wes Leckrone
(front left), to discuss bills related to college tuition.